When attending lectures and seminars and courses for years, one gets to see all kinds of teachers and lecturers and trainers. Some are great, many are “okay” and some are really really bad. It’s especially a shame when the contents would be good but the presentation is so horrible it destroys the show. When faced with incompetent teachers, the easiest thing to do is to criticize it – so that’s precisely what I’m going to do here.
Here are some suggestions / “rules” to teachers and cases I’ve witnessed when they were broken:
- Only have one conversation at a time – the one with your students. There was one teacher who shamelessly kept answering his phone during teaching a class – and 15 minutes later the same guy has the audacity to point out that laptops shouldn’t be used in the classroom. If the teacher can’t keep the phone off, how does he expect others to keep laptops off? Besides, maybe they students were using their laptops for taking notes, instead of discussing the shopping list as the teacher was doing during the phone call, with seemingly no situational awareness whatsoever.
- Keep your pet peeves off the stage. When a student is presenting a topic in a seminar, it’s not entirely polity to ramble on about your own topic of interest. When someone is presenting, let him or her present! For a first-timer on the stage, it’s awkward enough without the professor going off on a tangent for 10 minutes in the middle of his/her presentation..
- Remember Presentation Skills 101: don’t talk to the slides. Make clean slides. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Clearly state the question policy. Have some structure. And so on. Seems like half the people you encounter presenting something haven’t taken a single course on how to present stuff.
- Don’t destroy your own credibility Let’s take a, *ahem*, purely hypothetical example. Say you’re teaching a course on Web 2.0 and related cool Internet stuff. Then let’s say you spend the first five minutes justifying your expertise by talking about all the WCDMA core network, 3GPP architecture network element courses etc that you have taught. What will you have accomplished? To anyone knowing anything about 3GPP standards and how the Internet works, you’ll have accomplished immediate and total destruction of your credibility, that’s what.
- Answer the questions: if there’s a question, answer it. If you don’t know the answer, say so. It’s quite simple really.
Finally, if you have ever had to create a Powerpoint presentation, take heed of the following. It’s one great presentation:
